By Christin Evans, HANC Board
As previously announced in the Voice, the Mayor’s Office of Economic & Workforce Development (OEWD) initiated a survey in October of 2020 to gather information about the unmet needs of neighbors within the 10-minute trade area surrounding the Haight Ashbury commercial corridor. Conducted by Livable City and Tom Radulovich, the survey asked where residents currently shopped for their household needs. The goal was to identify potential opportunities to attract new businesses to Haight street that were most in demand from the immediate neighbors.
The survey was conducted over 2 months and at a time when the corridor has been hard hit with storefront closures. The Haight Ashbury Merchants Association (HAMA), which tracks the number of storefront vacancies had previously reported that a number of stores had closed between 2016 and 2020 due to a number of reasons including skyrocketing rents, higher costs of doing business in the city such as the rising minimum wage, and the multi-year construction work which disrupted foot traffic in the corridor. The number of storefront vacancies rose from 6 in 2016, to 21 in February 2020 and 31 in December 2020.
With 31 storefronts to fill, the survey offers some much needed information about the businesses the neighbors would most like to see. Over 300 survey respondents prioritized these business types: Clothing stores with options for different ages & body types (66 respondents), Drugstore & Pharmacy (62), Shoe & Leather repair (47), Cafes (42), and a Bakery (24). Additionally a theme emerged that new Restaurants of all varieties would be welcome. The survey asked respondents how they selected the places they shopped and the most common response was “A Place I Frequented Before the Pandemic.”
The survey also sought information on the use of delivery apps for restaurants and grocery stores. Respondents proportionately reported relatively low use of these services (fewer than a fifth of respondents said they mostly or very often relied on third party applications to order food). However, since it was the first time the city had asked these questions in one of their studies, OEWD didn’t have any comparison data to other neighborhoods to determine if the response is in line, more or less than other areas of the city.
What’s next? OEWD doesn’t have any immediate plans for investment in the corridor beyond the programs they’ve been undertaking city-wide to support small businesses weather the economic hardship brought on from pandemic closures. But the Haight Ashbury Merchants Association (HAMA) is seeking to engage with HANC, CVIA and other neighborhood groups on an economic recovery plan for the corridor which might include a marketing effort to fill empty storefronts with the business types prioritized by respondents in the survey. Stay tuned for more on that effort later this year.